For all the musicological discussion over the past few decades regarding the death of the author, following Roland Barthes’s seminal essay, comparatively little has been written about the musical author’s birth. ^{Footnote 1} This is perhaps surprising in relation to early music history, given that the discernibility of the individual composer as the originator of the musical work (if we can use this term here) is one of the distinguishing features of Western art music, at least from the thirteenth century onward.

But as Stephen Rose explores in his new book, the implications of early modern authorship are complex and often difficult to recognise and fully appreciate in a historically nuanced way – despite the unquestionable fact that notions of authorship became such a central feature of European music. This is particularly true in the case of composers active in the Lutheran German-speaking world during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who form the subject of Rose’s study. This area of study has been traditionally thorny for music historians, in terms of identifying common themes and practices. The years following the Thirty Years War saw a major upheaval, in theological, social and economic terms. And with regard to the music of the time, the surviving documentary evidence, including dedications and assertions of ownership, there are as many contradictions and discontinuities as there are any trends or patterns.

Drawing on his broad expertise on the period, Rose traces and evaluates several different but important areas where notions of original creativity and ownership might be seen to have been exercised, and where demonstrations of authorship might therefore be detected. Referring to research based on newly discovered documents regarding publication rights and privileges, Rose’s book manages to present some fascinating fresh research and commentary, while simultaneously questioning some of the core traditionally accepted understandings regarding musical authorship – particularly with regard to the issue of the emergence of notions of intellectual property, which I discuss below.

Much of the book builds on the valuable insights of Rose’s previous monograph The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach (Cambridge, 2014), which examined the often-overlooked (at least in English-speaking scholarship) array of novels about and by late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century German musicians. In this book, Rose highlighted many of the thinly veiled underlying social anxieties that plagued Lutheran musicians during the period, who sought to elevate society’s perceptions of music and, in turn, the esteem of musicians. In this new book, Rose deals with many of the same themes, albeit from a different perspective.

One of the main reasons there has been a relatively small discourse surrounding the concept of authorship, particularly in the study of Baroque and early modern repertoires, is that it is often difficult to identify just how far composers perceived themselves as composers or authors. With a lack of clear evidence to suggest that seventeenth-century German musicians sought to present themselves as composers, distinct from their parallel careers as performers, scholars have tended to propagate the idea that composition was simply something that musicians did as part of their duties, and that they had no aspirations to be regarded as authors. For example, despite J. S. Bach’s descriptions of relatives, the brothers Johann Christoph Bach and Johann Michael Bach, as ‘ein profonder Componist’ and ‘ein habiler Componist’ respectively, Daniel Melamed has suggested that neither of these figures would have regarded themselves primarily as composers:

Melamed’s suggestion has particular resonance given its associations with J. S. Bach, who, from the nineteenth century onward, was widely regarded as the musical author par excellence. Bach, in fact, styled himself both as composer (using the title Componist) and, in the dedicatory preface of his Musicalisches Opfer addressed to Frederick the Great, as author (dem Verfasser). In his preface, Bach referred to the now-fabled performance he gave for Frederick at Potsdam two years earlier, before going on to describe how, afterwards, he ‘resolved therefore and promptly pledged myself to work out this right Royal theme more fully (dieses recht Königliche Thema vollkommener auszuarbeiten) and then make it known to the world’. Together, these two pieces of information suggest that Bach did, in fact, consider composition as a separate activity from performance and improvisation, and that the presentation of the print thereby made him an author.

It is consistently tricky to read between the lines of the prefaces, dedications and letters between composers and their patrons. These are often filled with standard tropes designed to massage patrons’ egos and essentially remove any suggestion of composers’ own professional ambitions and/or social aspirations. It is therefore telling that Bach opted to sign himself as dem Verfasser, rather than another more ingratiating term, which would have articulated the hierarchical distance between the dedicatee and himself (though he does describe himself as Frederick’s ‘most humble and obedient servant’ in the body of the text). The implication is clear: Bach is the author of the entire print, rather than just the dedication.

Rose frames the focus of his attention between Bach and Heinrich Schütz – the two composers who might be regarded as the Alpha and Omega of German Baroque music. Like Bach, Schütz also described himself as an author in various places, particularly in the texts accompanying his printed music. On the title page of his first printed publication, the Psalmen Davids (Dresden, 1619), Schütz proudly included the information (in red print, no less) ‘Published by the author’ (In Vorlegung des Authoris). Furthermore, in the preface addressed to the reader at the front of the basso continuo book of his Symponiae Sacrae II (Dresden, 1647), issued in the latter stages of Schütz’s career, the composer issued a set of instructions specifying how the contents should be performed. He urged any would-be performers of the music contained within the collection to familiarise themselves with the latest techniques, as developed in Italy, so that ‘neither they nor the author himself [i.e. Schütz], through no fault of his own, might receive unexpected derision instead of the proper gratitude’. ^{Footnote 3} Here, Schütz expresses a clear anxiety that would become a received part of later understandings of composers’ priorities as authors, that his music be performed according with his intentions – particularly insituations where he was not present. This authorial anxiety can be observed elsewhere in Schütz’s letters and publications, particularly in the case of his Historia der Geburt Jesu Christi, for which he only published the vocal parts, withholding the accompanying instrumental parts, concerned that they might lead to sub-par performances by ensembles not capable of doing the piece justice, thereby reflecting badly on him.

Rose uses Schütz and Bach as the bookends of his study, though he actually spends more time considering materials pertaining to the earlier composer and his contemporaries – and frequently delves into the earlier classical and humanist models that shaped Lutheran culture. Though this book does not necessarily offer a particularly revealing insight into authorship in relation to Bach, it is nonetheless helpful in that it provides a valuable sense of the broader picture that constituted his cultural hinterland. In his opening chapter, ‘God, Talent, Craft: Concepts of Musical Creativity’, which establishes a framework for subsequent sections of the text, Rose examines some of the core contemporary theological ideas that contemporary Lutherans held regarding creativity and considers their implications with regard to musical composition. He offers what he calls a ‘historical counterweight’ to the ‘notion of “invention”’, as theorised by Laurence Dreyfus in his seminal book Bach and the Patterns of Invention. ^{Footnote 4} In his text, Dreyfus sought to illustrate the fundamental basis of Bach’s compositional process, proposing that it was based on the progressive elaboration of basic musical ideas, in line with classical rhetorical principles and the fundamental concept of inventio. Dreyfus’s text is a masterpiece of analysis, showing clearly in musical terms how Bach’s music was constructed. His fundamental point is that Bach was actively composing ‘against the grain’ – i.e. against the norms of his contemporaries and predecessors, insofar as the creative process was understood. However, in exploring several of the most compelling perspectives in the debates concerning invention by Bach’s contemporaries, including insights from Johann Mattheson and Johann David Heinichen, Rose establishes that there was really no particular grain to compose against.

Though Rose does not necessarily contradict Dreyfus’s readings of Bach’s music, he demonstrates that there was far from any clear consensus in the German-speaking world on the origins of musical creativity during the period, and that any attempt to suggest there might have been is inherently problematic. Whereas some theorists regarded musical invention as a God-given gift, other figures such as Friedrich Erhard Niedt depicted it as more of an artisanal activity that could be acquired and mastered through hard work and application. While Dreyfus shows Bach’s technique in subjecting musical materials to the processes of invention (i.e. working them), Rose goes one level deeper in asking questions about how composers and their contemporaries understood where their initial musical ideas came from. This chapter essentially sets up the underlying questions that the rest of Rose’s book considers.

One area where it is often especially difficult to gain a clear perspective is in the discussions regarding how far originality distinguished authorship, and how far imitation was accepted. It is frequently asserted – often in particular relation to Handel in mainstream journalism – that imitation did not necessarily denote plagiarism, that it was part and parcel of Baroque music and nobody really took issue with it. ^{Footnote 5} Stephen Rose shows that musical borrowing was, in fact, an infinitely more complex subject in early modern Lutheran circles than this, with which numerous commentators took issue – particularly in the years after 1700, when musical works began to be regarded as composers’ personal capital. ^{Footnote 6} While imitation and borrowing were indeed regarded as important parts of composers’ training and education, Rose shows how a change in economic models encouraged composers including Johann David Heinichen and Johann Mattheson to advance claims of musical ownership, and an increasing unease that their own work might enrich others. Indeed, music’s ephemeral nature, and the difficulty of making it into a saleable item, was something that Adam Smith still recognised even towards the end of the eighteenth century. In his Wealth of Nations, Smith likened musicians’ work to that of churchmen, doctors and lawyers, insofar as it ‘does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject; or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour could afterwards be procured’. ^{Footnote 7}

But as Rose demonstrates over the course of his text, there was a plurality of attitudes in the German-speaking world at the time, informed by the different theological and educational tenets. Rose’s second chapter actually goes well beyond the scope of the period, providing a helpful general overview relating how the idea of borrowing was perceived by classical authors such as Quintilian and Horace, and how these were passed on to early modern European culture by prominent humanists such as Erasmus. But he relates these back to a more specific level concerning German music, introducing a wide variety of source materials to show how similar concerns continued to be held by composers and theorists alike, and demonstrating examples of how seventeenth-century musicians navigated the space between material and experiential culture that is unique to music.

Rose identifies two main forms of individuation in early modern German culture as being particularly relevant to the emergence of musical authors. He sees validations of individuality as being rooted either in physicality or in deeds – i.e. in the transformation of the natural world. As mentioned above, this is especially difficult to do in music, at least in any durable way. Rose goes into greater depth in exploring the former, taking into account the different marks of individuation used by composers in their prints, as attempts to define and authenticate themselves in their works. One of the most important examples Rose discusses is the inclusion of composer portraits in their prints, asking what this might have communicated to owners of the prints. Rose makes convincing parallels with Luther’s own theology and the work of Albrecht Dürer in the visual arts. However, this second form of individuation – that composition could be a form of human work capable of transforming the natural world (if not creating things ex nihilo) and make it better – is another area that is worthy of further research, in particular in relation to Lutheran musical cultures. The notion that composition was a deed, and that the more effort was applied to it (generally mental, rather than physical) the better the product, is something that can be detected throughout the period. In a notable example, Johann Abraham Birnbaum stressed this, in his defence of Bach against the criticisms levelled by Johann Adolph Scheibe:

While Birnbaum was seeking to uphold Bach’s music’s value, what this episode actually highlights most is that Bach’s aesthetics were in fact rooted in an earlier conception of what composition was all about. To Birnbaum (and presumably Bach), authorship was an attempt to actively improve nature, achieved via the labour process.

On the face of it, from our own perspective it is easy to presume that this work presented composers with authorial ownership of their music, in line with the post-Lockean concept of property that we take for granted. The author does the work, and therefore subsequently gains the right to exert authorial ownership over it. But, as Rose shows in his fourth chapter, ‘The Rites of Musical Ownership’, ‘many Lutherans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have been bemused by the claim that music can be owned’. ^{Footnote 9} At the centre of the book, this chapter contains the bulk of the original research unearthed by Rose, some of which he introduced earlier in an article. ^{Footnote 10} Examining the correspondence between composers including Heinrich Schütz, Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Albert, their patrons, and various publishers, Rose identifies a range of different models of ownership for musical prints, many of which seem contradictory. One of his central attempts in this chapter is to redress some of the assumptions regarding how this period marked the emergence of intellectual property rights, particularly those asserted by the German legal scholar Hansjörg Pohlmann. ^{Footnote 11} In the 1960s, Pohlmann suggested that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German musicians were pioneers in asserting economic and moral rights over their works, but Rose shows that this ‘teleological interpretation’ is highly problematic.

Instead, Rose offers what he calls a more ‘historically nuanced account’, introducing a series of newly unearthed documents that show the inner workings of the privilege system in greater relief. Privileges are a notoriously thorny area, as there is a great deal of space between the symbolic prestige associated with them and their influence in a legal and financial context. If you only have time to read a single chapter of the book, I would suggest starting with this one. There is a lot of information in it, and it will probably change your understanding of the models of privileges quite dramatically. In essence, Rose shows that while privileges were granted across the German-speaking world, both in local and imperial domains, they were rarely upheld, and he proposes that composers who sought to protect their publications did so purely for business reasons – rather than because they felt they had any sense of intellectual property rights, contrary to Pohlmann’s suggestions. Like everything in this period, it is complicated – and this chapter requires several re-readings to fully appreciate it. But is it not possible that both perspectives perhaps offer fair readings of the situation, just at different levels of magnification? Regardless, Pohlmann’s work would have been infinitely enriched by Rose’s, if the timelines had been inverted. And in any case, there is surely much lost between the florid correspondence and publications, which are filled with rhetoric, and the true historical reality – which, although irrecoverable, is hinted at by the fact that several of these composers were clearly pretty sharp operators.

In many ways, Rose’s final full-length chapter focuses the previous chapters’ insights into practical musical insights. In seeking ‘a better understanding of the prerogatives of the musical author’, he revisits familiar ground including Nikolaus Listenius’s separation of musica into three parts, examining this account through the eyes of composers and performers, rather than other theorists, as has been most commonly the case. Rose discusses the issues related to ornamentation in performance and examines the origins of the common perception of the composer as the ideal performer – taking up this latter issue in particular relation to keyboardist-composers following the lead of Johann Jacob Froberger. Rose’s treatment of the historical sources is consistently meticulous, and the breadth of materials he manages to relate in this closing chapter is impressive (and will no doubt be useful to a broad range of scholars and performers). However, there is certainly room for some of his observations and conclusions to be expanded upon, and for the broader ramifications of his observations to be observed against the larger-scale historiographical picture.

At just over two hundred pages, this is a densely packed but readable text. Each chapter could easily provide the basis for book-length studies in their own right, and it is difficult to do justice in a review to the rich insights that this book provides. Rose’s documentary research is, as ever, apparently sound and convincing – even if there might have been some scope to expand his final Conclusion chapter beyond three pages, given the magnitude of all that he covers. Nonetheless, this book will be of interest to specialist scholars as well as a helpful text for those seeking to gain a greater insight more generally into the complex worlds of creativity and ownership in Baroque music, which often seem so remote from later societies’ values. But like all the best books, it poses as many pertinent questions as it offers answers, and I have no doubt that this text will stimulate and encourage a significant amount of further research and discourse in this area of musicological scholarship and beyond.